As You Work Toward Digital Transformation, Don’t Forget Your People
One of the most often-used phrases in financial services technology today is “enterprise infrastructure.” In recent discussions with IT executives, I’ve heard them speak of “enterprise data architecture,” “enterprise risk management,” and so on. The phrase stems from the CIO’s need to achieve digital transformation (DX) by leveraging systems across the whole organization.
For instance, by building a single data architecture—including hardware, software, governance, etc.—the same data infrastructure can be used across the organization, from the CEO and CFO, to risk managers, to small-business lenders at the branch. DX will depend on the ability of the organization to create enterprise-wide capabilities like enterprise data infrastructures.
At IDC, we’ve identified five different areas that are critical to the success of a DX initiative. One of those five areas is what we call WorkSource DX. Recognizing that the people are as important to digital transformation as the technology, we believe that financial institutions need to have the same recognition, and create strategies for building “enterprise worksource infrastructures” to help manage and optimize the use of their human resources to achieve business transformation.
If you think about it, the people who work day-to-day in the lines of business, whether branch tellers, contact center agents, or back-office staff, are already an infrastructure, albeit in the most informal, and unmanaged, sense. Like the technologies in which the organization has invested (and acknowledging that the investment in people is at the same scale as the investment in IT), it is incumbent on the organization to “enterprise-enable” these people as well. Unfortunately, few organizations today recognize the vital importance of this infrastructure.
The IDC DX Maturity model for WorkSource DX begins with a state described as “Ad Hoc,” where there is limited visibility into resource needs, productivity, and performance against goals. There are individual islands of staff productivity for organizations just starting down the path to transformation. This description fits many, if not most, financial institution staffing environments. The end game for WorkSource DX is “Optimized: Organizational culture employs anytime-anywhere resource deployment for transformation. Teams self-organize to achieve results.”
If this seems like an unachievable panacea, don’t worry. IDC has identified four interim levels of achievement that institutions can work toward. But it all has to start with recognizing the need for what is already a de facto infrastructure, and beginning to create enterprise tools to manage the most critical of enterprise infrastructures—the people.
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